Daily Archives: December 7th, 2016

Comments Off on ‘He got up there and lied his a– off’: Carrier union leader on Trump’s big deal

Another Face of The Carrier deal. MA

The Secret Service agents told the Carrier workers to stay put, so Chuck Jones sat in the factory conference room for nearly three hours, waiting for president-elect Donald Trump. He’d grown used to this suspense.
Seven months earlier, at a campaign rally in Indianapolis, Trump had pledged to save the plant’s jobs, most of which were slated to move to Mexico. Then the businessman won the election, and the 1,350 workers whose paychecks were on the line wondered if he’d keep his promise.
Jones, president of the United Steelworkers 1999, which represents Carrier employees, felt optimistic when Trump announced last week that he’d reached a deal with the factory’s parent company, United Technologies, to preserve 1,100 of the Indianapolis jobs — until the union leader heard from Carrier that only 730 of the production jobs would stay and 550 of his members would lose their livelihoods, after all.
At the Dec. 1 meeting, where Trump was supposed to lay out the details, Jones hoped he would explain himself.
“But he got up there,” Jones said Tuesday, “and, for whatever reason, lied his a– off.”
In front of a crowd of about 150 supervisors, production workers and reporters, Trump praised Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies. “Now they’re keeping — actually the number’s over 1,100 people,” he said, “which is so great.”
Jones wondered why the president-elect appeared to be inflating the victory. Trump and Pence, he said, could take credit for rescuing 800 of the Carrier jobs, including non-union positions.
Of the nearly 1,400 workers at the Indianapolis plant, however, 350 in research and development were never scheduled to leave, Jones said. Another 80 jobs, which Trump seemed to include in his figure, were non-union clerical and supervisory positions. (A Carrier spokesperson confirmed the numbers.) And now the president-elect was applauding the company and giving it millions of dollars in tax breaks, even as hundreds of Indianapolis workers prepared to be laid off.
“Trump and Pence, they pulled a dog and pony show on the numbers,” said Jones, who voted for Hillary Clinton but called her “the better of two evils.” “I almost threw up in my mouth.”
Spokespeople for Trump did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
In exchange for downsizing its move south of the border, United Technologies would receive $7 million in tax credits from Indiana, to be paid in $700,000 installments each year for a decade. Carrier, meanwhile, agreed to invest $16 million in its Indiana operation. United Technologies still plans to send 700 factory jobs from Huntington, In, to Monterrey, Mexico.
T.J. Bray, 32, one of the workers who will keep his job, sat in the front row during the Dec. 1 meeting as Trump spoke. A corporate employee had guided him specifically to that seat, he said, so he suspected he might be part of Trump’s remarks.
On Carrier’s makeshift stage, Trump paraphrased the words of an unnamed Carrier employee who talked to an NBC reporter after the election. Bray was the only Carrier employee who had appeared on television that day. Apparently, he realized, Trump was saying he inspired the deal.
“He said something to the effect, ‘No, we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise,” Trump said. “Not with Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.”
In fact, Trump did make that commitment, and it’s on video. “They’re going to call me and they are going to say ‘Mr. President, Carrier has decided to stay in Indiana,’” Trump had said at the April rally. “One hundred percent — that’s what is going to happen.”
Last week, though, the president-elect told the Carrier crowd he hadn’t meant that literally.
“I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in,” Trump said. “Because they made the decision a year and a half ago. But he believed that was — and I could understand it. I actually said — I didn’t make it — when they played that, I said, ‘I did make it, but I didn’t mean it quite that way.’”
Trump asked if the employee he’d been referencing was in the audience. A woman yelled that her son was, and Trump began to compliment that son, though he hadn’t spoken in the television news segment. (Bray said that a United Technologies spokesperson later told him Trump meant to single him out.)
“I was confused when he was like, ‘I wasn’t talking about Carrier,’” Bray said. “You made this whole campaign about Carrier, and we’re still losing a lot of jobs.”
Bray clapped that day, anyway, for the 800 that would remain on American soil

Exclusive: CEO who just went toe-to-toe with Donald Trump…
United Technologies (UTX) CEO Greg Hayes told Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview on Monday about his conversation with Donald Trump last week, and says there was no “quid pro quo” with the president-elect.
“I think we came up with a relatively good solution for everybody … We still got to do the preponderance of the restructuring, which we were going to do anyways. So it’s — I would say no ‘deal,’ but at the end of the day a good deal for UTC,” Hayes told the ” Mad Money ” host.
United Technologies is the parent company of furnace and air conditioner maker Carrier, which was under fire by Trump on the campaign trail because of its plans to move some manufacturing operations to Mexico from Indiana. Trump used Carrier as an example to highlight the decline of manufacturing in America.
Ultimately, United Technologies agreed to receive $7 million in tax credits from the State of Indiana, issued at $700,000 per year for 10 years. Carrier also agreed to invest approximately $16 million in its Indiana facilities, and will keep more than 1,000 people employed in Indianapolis.
Hayes stated that he received a phone call from Trump a week before Thanksgiving, with a request from the president-elect to reexamine the decision to close the Indianapolis Carrier factory.
“He said, ‘We are going to do a lot of things in this country that are going to make it a lot more conducive to manufacturing. We are going to take the tax rate down; we are going to reduce all of this burdensome regulation. When all that happens you are going to be printing money, but I need you to relook at your decision to close the factory in Indiana,'” Hayes said.
Hayes confirmed that there is approximately 1 million manufacturing square feet in Mexico already, thus he considered it to be a natural evolution to close facilities in Indiana and move them to Mexico .
“Nor was there any, I would say, deal,” Hayes said about his conversation with Trump, “There was no quid pro quo for him to say ‘look, I am not going to tax you, if you don’t do this.’ He simply said ‘take a look at this.'”
And while Hayes did agree to keep employees in Indiana, he said he still considers free trade to be essential for the growth of the U.S.
“This country was founded on two principles, right – immigration and free trade. And that is what made America great over time because we had to develop and innovate in the U.S. and take those products and sell them around the world,” Hayes said.
Carrier will still close its Huntington, Indiana facility and move 700 jobs to Mexico